|
Diamond Radeon HD 4870 1GB
Introduction
With every single one of the tests I put our many Radeon HD 4870s through, I was impressed. That didn't mean that I had reservations; I wondered right away why there wasn't a 1GB model. It seemed like in every benchmark, once the resolution started climbing, once anti-aliasing was turned up, the card seemed to suffer. It was being punished for not having a large enough frame buffer. Obviously, the higher-density GDDR5 was being saved for the 4870 X2, which earned the memory no doubt. But there was a painful performance gap and NVIDIA exploited it well with the GTX 280. The 4870 had no problems at lower resolutions but even at 1680x1050 it started to lag behind the GTX 260. The solution here was obvious. Just add RAM. Normally, adding more video memory is a mistake. It's a ploy by the manufacturer to make their card look special, it's a way to make a card sound more capable than it is, and it's a way to tack on a significant sticker price without adding any component costs. Most often with these cards, the larger frame buffer is actually a downgrade. It's cheap, old memory, and much, much slower. The practical upshot is that these inflated cards are no better than their counterparts, and sometimes a little worse.   But the 4870 doesn't get that abuse. It gets double the same ridiculously-fast GDDR5 and it keeps the bus width. It beats the 4870 across the board, but how does it fare against NVIDIA's top cards? Smooth Creations let me play with the Diamond 4870 HD from their LANShark. Here's how things worked out. The Card & Bundle I didn't get a retail card, but it is a stock design. And stock is really stock. It's identical to an HD 4870, except for the sticker, which would be identical, too, except for the fact that it tells you this is the gigabyte version. If I was better with Photoshop (that is to say, GIMP) I'd just add "1GB" to the photos I've already taken. Shopping around, the retail package doesn't differentiate itself from other 4870s, which isn't a bad thing at all. It's as complete as it needs to be, with HDMI and VGA adapters, a video break-out cable, a CrossFire bridge, and a six-pin auxiliary power adapter. The board's sexy and red, and the heatsink's copper and chunky. In my experience, the fan moves a lot of air and is capable of making a lot of noise, but only if you suffocate it while running.  
Page 1: The Card, Bundle & Test Setup
Page 2: Specifications and Setup Page 3: DirectX 10 Titles Page 4: DX9, OpenGL, and Synthetics Page 5: Video, Power, and Overclocking Page 6: Conclusion 
Related Reviews Video Cards September 23, 2009
Video Cards June 25, 2009
Video Cards June 8, 2009
Video Cards April 6, 2009
Add Comment
0 User Comments Add Comment To add a comment without being a member, you may omit the password field, but you must enter your name (or nickname) along with your comment. * Denotes required fields. |
Recent Articles Editorials March 15, 2010
Editorials August 27, 2009
Editorials August 18, 2009
Editorials March 17, 2009
Recent News Good Old Games Mar. 21, 2010 - 12:43 pm
Jason Bradbury Mar. 19, 2010 - 10:52 pm
Rock Paper Shotgun Mar. 19, 2010 - 10:44 pm
joystiq Mar. 19, 2010 - 6:58 pm
Tom's Hardware Mar. 19, 2010 - 4:42 pm
Rock Paper Shotgun Mar. 18, 2010 - 11:58 pm
Fudzilla Mar. 18, 2010 - 11:57 pm
|
|||||||||||||||
